


The Door into Summer

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, Gen, New Year's Eve, Pre-Slash, Song Lyrics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 16:26:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3074372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft and Lestrade are on security detail for the royals' "private" New Year's Eve party at Buckingham Palace. Nothing much transpires, but it fails to transpire gracefully, until they slope off together with intent to explore. (smile)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Door into Summer

**Nota Bene:** I usually prefer to stick notes at the bottom—and there are some down there. But I really recommend listening to the linked piece before reading. It’s a “[Summertime](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4qSuncGWNs)” quite unlike that by Gershwin, for Porgy and Bess. It’s by Leonard Cohen and Janet Robinson, and it’s sung by Janet Robinson, and it catches a mood I hope I caught at least a bit—that sad longing that belongs to various times of our lives, and seasons of our souls. New Year’s is a good time for it: the dead of winter, the Bleak Midwinter, the time when you hunger for the sun, the time when you wonder how you life can change, and how it should change. If you take nothing else from this story but the song, you’ll still have profited, to my way of looking at things. The second song, “[The Parting Glass](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FD5xQVqmAU),” is less crucial, but I’m giving you a version by the Pogues just because I like it, and consider it a nice, rough version I can believe in Lestrade singing with his mates down at a pub some night or another. And if you can’t look up “Auld Lang Syne” yourselves, you are simply not trying hard enough!

The title of the story is a hat-tip to Robert Heinlein’s “Door into Summer,” and though Mycroft is a very different cat than the cat of the novel—he deserves his own door into the Summerland.

 

Happy New Year’s, my dears.

 

 

The two men slipped through the milling mob, each performing two jobs, each largely unnoticed by all but the very few in the know. Mycroft was clad in his “festive best.” Lestrade fought back laughter, as Mycroft’s “festive best” was largely indistinguishable from his warrior-weeds: the sooty, deep grey pinstripe with the conservative cut and the matching weskit. He wore his tie and pocket square like a knight wore his sigil: his tie _gules—_ bright red, with a pocket square differenced* only by being _estoilé argent —s_cattered with silver stars.

This Lestrade knew because Mycroft had told him so, smiling mischievously, as they reviewed the security plans for the evening. New Year’s Eve, and everyone who was anyone was there. Well—almost. Their Majesties, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, were showing up for mere minutes and then scurrying home to give it a miss. But Prince Charles and Camilla would be there, and their boys, and Duchess Kate, and Cameron, and Boris—of course. And half the dignitaries in London. More than half. And there, in the middle of a very sober strategic review, Mycroft had looked up, sparkling, and allowed that he was quite pleased with the affect, and laid it out in nice, heraldic terms…and laughed when Lestrade snorted his amusement.

Lestrade found Mycroft to be—

No. He wasn’t sure what to say about that. Every time he tried, he grabbed for a different adjective. “Maddening.” “Funny.” “Infuriating.” “Supercilious.” “Dapper.” “Brilliant.” “Adorable.” “Prim.”

Too many. Tonight, though, it had been “charming.” And “whimsical.” And, perhaps, “excited.” The party and the plans seemed to have Lestrade’s MI6 associate ever so faintly high. If it had been Sherlock Lestrade would have been plotting for a chance to check the man’s pupils and listening suspiciously for sounds of a runny nose. As it was Mycroft, he instead wondered why so unsocial a man was so giddy at the idea of a party. A party, for that matter, at which they were on security detail.

In any case…there was Mycroft, dark and deadly and dressed in his classy best, with that red pocket square sprinkled with silver stars al tucked in and puffed with a far more frothy, fay look than Mycroft usually affected. The ends rose up like soft petals from the straight line of the jacket pocket, and then flared wide, with a fat little puff of fabric in the middle. It was an origami flower of soft silk, Christmas red and covered in stars.

Lestrade wore what he considered his basic disguise when forced to do anything with events like this: A waiter’s black trousers and dinner jacket, a white dress shirt, and a tie. It had originally been a black tie, too. When Mycroft had looked and huffed, he’d said, “What? I got it right, I know I did. ‘Black tie and tails,” only I’m passing as a waiter, so I don’t need tails.”

“You don’t need a black tie, either,” Mycroft said. “You don’t look like a waiter, you look like an undertaker. No one in their right minds wants to accept a glass of champagne from a man who looks like an undertaker.”

“Well good-o, then,” Lestrade grumbled. “’S not like I plan to tote a tray of drinks around in any case. Pace through looking restless, me, like I’ve been told to count noses to figure out how many more bottles of bubbly they may need to open, yeah?”

“Undertaker,” Mycroft said, again, as though that pronouncement trumped good disguise sense. “I’ll lend you something.”

“Mycrooooft.” He knew he sounded like a five-year-old boy being dragooned into Sunday church clothes. But, then he _felt_ like a five-year-old boy being dragooned into Sunday church clothes: too closely scrutinized by too clever-eyed a judge.

“Hush,” Mycroft had said, and wafted off, only to return from his private cubby in the Palace with a tie that looked far too expensive even at a distance of six feet back—and that looked obscenely expensive close-to. Lestrade took it gingerly between his fingers, and nearly squeaked—even he could tell the tie he was touching cost more than anything he’d ever worn around his neck before, barring the gold chain and cross and St. Christopher’s medal he’d been given at his first communion. The silk was so dense, in spite of being light, and the sense of body was shivery-lush and supple—almost like holding an actual living snake, it had so much heft. The fabric was a stunning and complex paisley in bright golds and dark, cinnamon-y browns on a background of black and dark soot grey that made the lighter colors seem to burn darkly.

“I—this is too good,” he said. “They’ll know it’s not mine.”

“They’ll be wrong,” Mycroft had sniffed, then, with exaggerated annoyance had snatched the tie back out of Lestrade’s fingers and tied it quickly and neatly…then tucked a pocket square in reverse colors into his pocket. Now the black and soot paisley brooded on a background of glowing fire…

“You need a tie pin,” Mycroft muttered. He glanced at Lestrade’s sleeves. “No need for cuff links, though,” he said, sounding almost sulky or disappointed. He was gone, and then back. He held out an old-style tie tack—a single tack with an ornamented head.

Lestrade took it and cocked it under the lights, and watched a satin ripple of light play over the serried lines of gold enamelwork. It was handsome.               

“Well, don’t’ just stand there, put it on,” Mycroft grumbled, and left without waiting.

The night had gone well. Their guard detail drifted, always alert, always aware, probably long-since identified by their counterparts, who were themselves identified in turn.

“Almost midnight,” Mycroft said, suddenly by Lestrade’s elbow.

Lestrade grunted agreement. “One nice thing about these more formal dos,” he said. “They don’t stay up all night. They leave that for the lower ranking toffs. They do the proper here, get it over with, then go on to more private places for the real party.”

“Yes. I daresay the place will be empty by quarter-to,” Mycroft agreed. “All quite orderly.”

“Barring the cheering and the confetti and the kisses.”

“Those are the parts we don’t have to partake of,” Mycroft said, sounding quite cheerful. “God is indeed merciful.”

Lestrade laughed at him. “Faker. Bet you’d be fine with cheering and confetti and kissing under the right circumstances.”

“In Buckingham Palace? With Camilla looking on? Heaven forbid.”

It was raining cats and dogs outside the wing of the Palace that held the party. Lestrade, backed up by one of the big windows, could hear it come down even over the music of the band. It would be a cold ride home—first the shuttle to MI5, then the drive home in his own car.

Winter. London…

“I wish it were summer,” he said, softly. “Warm. Sunny.”

“Do be serious,” Mcyroft said. “This is England, not Greece. ‘Partly cloudy, expected showers.’ That’s more like it.”

“Dear old Blighty,” Lestrade sighed again. “Still, a nice day on the shore in the West Country…”

“A crisp wind off the Atlantic,” Mycroft murmured in mock romantic tones.

“Aw, cut it out, Holmes. You’re putting holes in my fantasy.”

“What are your New Year’s resolutions,” Mycroft said, not apologizing in the least.

“Resolutions? Plural? I already know I’ll break one—why double down on a losing proposition?” He glanced sideward at the taller man, giving him the hairy eyeball. “Don’t tell me you do yours in duplicate.”

Mycroft scoffed softly. “It’s hardly worth the effort of thinking them up and making the commitment if you’re going to stop short of a good half-dozen.”

“I’d kick you, but that sleek tigress you keep as your henchwoman would assume I was a Russian agent and kill me,” Lestrade grumbled. “But you do know that’s indecent, don’t you?”

“ _Au contraire_ ,” Mycroft said, even as he nodded politely to Harry the Equerry floating past with his wife embraced in a chaste grip. “My resolutions are all that is proper.”

“Mmmm?” Lestrade grumbled, darkly. “I’ll believe it when I hear it.”

“To begin with,” Mycroft said, “I’m giving up cigarettes.”

“You don’t smoke cigarettes.”

“I do so.”

“Well…I mean, _low tar._ You can hardly call that smoking, even if you do it often. The way you do it, it’s more like getting your booster shot to keep your aversion up to date.”

The band started playing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Lestrade was reminded of the difference between the upper classes and his own solid working class—they all knew how to dance ballroom, even if they did it with a certain lackluster despair that suggested they’d have been happier clubbing somewhere writhing to something less stately and formal.

“The singer’s quite good,” Mycroft said. “I believe she’s a friend of Anthea’s.”

She was indeed quite good, with a silky, rich, warm voice that was somehow still capable of cool, precise notes. Lestrade glanced at his wrist watch. Going on midnight—five minutes to go. He snatched glasses off the tray being carried by one of his own team, winking at the man as he passed. He shoved one glass into Mycroft’s hand. “Almost time.”

Mycroft took the glass, checked his own pocket watch, and said, “So it is,” as he tucked it back into the watch pocket of his weskit. “Toasts soon, then.”

“What else are you resolving? Besides cigarettes, which doesn’t count because you don’t smoke.”

“I really do.”

“I’ve seen you. I promise, you really don’t. You don’t even suck it down properly.”

“You mean like air when you’re drowning?”

“Yeah—that’s how you know when you need to quit, Mike. When smoke’s like air, and you need it to live.”

“Maybe you should resolve to quit, too.”

“I already did.”

“I saw you with a cigarette just three hours ago!”

“And I told you I break my New Year’s resolutions. QED, right?”

“Ah. You could quit with me?”

“Works better if you quit with someone you see more than once or twice a month for a meeting. No offense, but…”

“Mmmm. Reasonable.” Mycroft sighed. “I’m going to spend an hour more each day on my treadmill.”

“Mycroft, you’re always on the treadmill.”

“If that’s intended as a witty comment on my work, it’s wasted. I assure you, my position is far more interesting than time on a treadmill.” He sounded dour.

“So why decide to spend more time on the thing?”

Mycroft patted his stomach. “Needs must.”**

Lestrade scoffed, but then smacked Mycroft’s elbow. “Here goes---“

Someone started a countdown, and the room stirred with excitement.

“What else?” Lestrade shouted over the sound.

“What?”

“Resolutions? What else?”

Mycroft, eyes racing over the room to track every move, every possible threat, said, “Lestrade…really…”

“No, come on. What else?”

Not fully alert, Mycroft shouted, “Nothing. Just—better. All right? _New. New._” His head swiveled on that long, slim neck, as he skimmed the assembly, looking for danger. In the sudden silence formed by accident or coincidence he said, once more, too loudly, “New…” His voice ached.

Lestrade frowned—but the count kept on.

Ten…

Nine…

Eight…

 _“All clear on this end, boss,”_ one of his people murmured in the little earpiece tucked into Lestrade’s ear.

Seven..

Six…

“No, Anthea, send McAllister into the gents. I’m pretty sure I know what’s wrong, and it’s not an emergency,” Mycroft was saying into his own headset. “Lorrimer’s already in there? Then don’t even send McAllister. Yes. Yes, I’m sure, Anthea—let them have what little New Year’s Eve they can get away with here at the Palace. Yes—yes…”

Three…

Two…

One…

Big Ben rang. All the bells of London rang. Fireworks went off over the Thames. Proper British aristocrats whooped properly, standing next to dignified diplomats who showed willing.

“Happy New Year’s, Mike,” Lestrade said.

“Mycroft.”

“Mike—come on, you need someone to call you something ordinary, just to keep you grounded,” Lestrade said. He held up his glass of champagne. “Toast the new year in?”

“Yes.”

The glasses chimed—silently, for all Lestrade knew, as the band had struck up, “Auld Lang Syne.”

The singer raised it up high, like the song was a  chalice, and the night itself was holy wine.

“Can’t make out a word of it,” Lestrade grumbled. “Bloody Scots. Can’t they say it in English?”

Mycroft looked at him reprovingly. “Shhhhh—we got through the referendum by the skin of our teeth. Do you want them to take affront?”

“No, nor aback, or sideways. But I’d love to know what the damned words mean.”

“They mean ‘we’ve been friends for a long time, and we remember those days, and we hope we’ll be friends for a long time to come,’” Mycroft said, and sipped the wine.

“Well, then! See? That wasn’t so hard.”

“You’re quite insufferable, you know.”

“I work at it.”

“I never would have guessed.”

Lestrade laughed and winked. “See? Fooled a Holmes,” he said, feigning smug satisfaction.

Mycroft flicked him a slight smile and then concentrated for a moment on his own headset. “No—start moving people out, if you can. Get a few bellwethers moving as the next song comes up. Did you friend pick to help close this thing down for us?”

Apparently she had. The singer moved elegantly from “Auld Lang Syne,” to “The Parting Glass.” Lestrade could already see the slight current as people near the doors eased backward, already planning their escape strategies and thinking either of bed or wilder parties than Queen Elizabeth’s Buckingham Palace was going to offer.

_Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had,_

_They’re sorry for my going away,_

_And all the sweethearts that e’er I had,_

_Would wish me one more day to stay…_

Lestrade, in the mood, sung along under his breath. It was a sweet song, wasn’t it?

“Can you really sing that and not…get caught up in the ironies?” Mycoft asked.

Lestrade stopped as the music carried on without him, cycling around for another tour through the song. He frowned—Mycroft’s voice was odd, and uncertain.

“Yeah,” he said. Then, thinking about it, he shrugged. “Near enough for singing after a few rounds of beer, anyway,” he continued. “The ex, even she was a bit sorry to see the back of me—and sorrier since then when she figured what she’d let walk away. Locked up some crooks, but no grief there, eh? Shot a few people for your lot, but likewise—world’s cleaner without ‘em. I’ve got people who’ll miss me when I’m gone. Close enough, yeah?”

Mycroft shook his head. “For you, perhaps. But, then, you’re a cleaner man all around.” Then, without warning, he walked away, disappearing into the surge of slowly migrating guests, no doubt to pick up his duties as Her Majesty’s Border Collie In-Chief, nipping briskly at the heels of her blue-blood cattle and keeping the wolves at bay.

Lestrade sighed, wistful without knowing quite why. He liked Mike, when it came down to it, he supposed, though a more difficult choice of friend was hard to imagine. He made even Sherlock look like a breezy little practice run, just enough to warm you up for the serious terrain a friendship with Mycroft represented.

The man wasn’t a collie, he thought. He was a cat—a dark, fierce, dangerous feral tom, something abandoned too young and left to protect himself from kicks and cars and rat poison in the skips to kill the likes of him. He’d known a cat like that—it had permitted him to feed it, never accepting more than the slightest of touches—and rarely those. But it had crept to him, bloody and broken after some disaster, and curled in his arms, and had purred and kneaded his chest when he took it in to the vet’s…and had died still purring, claws still catching and leaving little loops in the knit of his jumper.

“He came to you,” the vet had said, comforting. “These ferals—it’s not always possible to bring them in. But if he came to you, then you can know he knew what you did for him, and trusted you.”

He’d cried…and that night he’d raised a parting glass to the beast. Then he’d taken the day off and driven out to an old lover’s place in the West Country and buried the beast under her rose bush in the back garden, with the warm jumper wrapped around him.

The only thing he thought he’d learned from it all was you wait for the cat to come to you. The rest was wordless silence and an empty feeling he hadn’t realized had been full until it wasn’t anymore.

He helped clear out the room. There were ways to push a little, pull a little, move people along. At last the majority of the guests were gone—only a few couples left listening to a much-reduced band doodling around as the stage was cleared and the rooms put to rights.

It was then he found Mycroft, standing tall and silent by one of the big windows again, looking out. He slid up behind him, and was surprised when Mycroft jumped, startled.

“Sorry. Figured you’d see me in the glass, at least,” he said, meeting the reflection of Mike’s eyes in the window.

Mike nodded, meeting the reflected eyes of Lestrade. “Preoccupied.”

“Trouble on the head set?”

“No. All going quite well, in fact,” Mycroft said. “So well I’m afraid my mind wandered.”

They looked at the rain falling, and the sheets of water coursing over the window.

“Cold,” Lestrade said, sadly. “Winter. London.”

“Good old Blightly,” Mycroft agreed. Then, quietly, he said, “Sometimes I want summer, too,” for all the world as though their conversation had never paused or been cut off.

“Wait four-five months you’ll have it.”

“No,” Mycroft said. “Not—not a season of the year. A season of the heart. Here it is autumn, and winter rising—and I find I’ve skipped straight past summer without ever noticing. If there was a way to go back, that would be one of my resolutions.” He lifted his chin. “Do you hear her? Up on the stage? Do you hear what she’s singing?”

Lestrade hadn’t noticed. It was sweet, though, and he caught it…so this was what had triggered Mycroft back into their abandoned dialogue….

_And I want the sand out there to lie on,_

_I want the sea out there to swim,_

_So my heart can take a holiday,_

_From breaking over him…._

“Who’d your heart break for?” Lestrade asked.

Mycroft shrugged. “No one who matters, now. It’s been a long time. By the time I realized, though, summer was gone.”

 “Screw metaphor, Mike. You don’t live one year—you live dozens. You get more than one summer.”

Mycroft shivered. Their eyes still met in the cold glass. Their shadowy reflections were cloaked in rain.

“I don’t know how to find it.”

Lestrade grinned. “Follow me; I’ll show you the door into summer.”

Mycroft’s eyes lit in amusement. “For what price?”

“Show me how to get this tie off without ruining it?”

Mycroft considered, then turned, fingers dancing over the warm gold silk, dipping into the dimple he himself had set in the tie only hours before. “I think I can manage that,” he said, voice purring, and followed the sunshine to a happier new year.

 

*Before you twinge too hard over the grammatical misuse of “differenced,” I’m using it in its heraldic mode. A coat of arms is “differenced” from a source coat of arms by minor details—so a second son might have his family coat of arms “differenced” by adding some element of his own choice, or by mixing with his wife’s family coat of arms, or similarly altered. As Mycroft wears his clothing as a form of social armor and weaponry, it seemed right to use heraldic grammatical structures to describe it.

In this instance Mycroft has a tie made with crimson silk, and a pocket square made with the same shade of silk but with a small star print in white flecked over it.

**I never know when to point out what abbreviated idioms mean. Thus part of me always wants to provide the expanded version “That’s the pot calling the kettle black,” and THEN explain it, when what I type as actual dialogue is literally just “Pot—kettle,” because the idiom is common enough that most English users of my generation will understand it. This is a similar situation. Most, though not all Americans of my generation would recognize the abbreviated “Needs must when the devil drives,” meaning when you’re driven by some unfortunate motivating factor, you do whatever has to be done to get through. In this case Mycroft is suggesting he’s gained too much weight and lost too much tone, and must compensate with exercise. Lestrade disagrees….


End file.
